The article examines the theoretical and methodological orientations and substantive scope of Anglophone fan studies in 1992, treating them as part of the first wave of scholarship on fans and fandoms. It offers a reconsideration of the influential conceptualization of the first-wave fan studies advanced by J. Gray, C. Sandvoss, and C. L. Harrington. More specifically, it argues that the methodological approaches characteristic of fan studies in 1992 cannot be adequately reduced to Michel de Certeau’s notion of “poaching.” Likewise, the field’s object of inquiry extended beyond fandom understood as a community of collective interpreters and included the intrapersonal motivations of individual fans. It further suggests that the conceptual boundaries of the first wave as a whole were drawn largely through the prism of Henry Jenkins’s influential understanding of fandom as a participatory community. The study is of interest to the scholars in media studies, cultural studies, sociology of culture, and communication studies, as well as to the researchers of fan communities and popular culture.
Contemporary digital platforms are transforming the structure of social reality by creating new forms of communication, interaction, and collective organization. In the conditions of a platform society, social relations are increasingly formed within media infrastructures where algorithms, interfaces, and user practices jointly determine the regimes of visibility, participation, and circulation of information. This development requires a reconsideration of the category of agency, since social action becomes closely connected with the medial conditions of its realization. The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of platform sociality through the lens of mediality as a structural condition for the formation of communicative agency in digital society. The article demonstrates that platform mediality shapes specific regimes of communication in which both human and algorithmic communicative agents operate. The analysis shows that agency in the digital environment emerges as an operational effect of media infrastructure and manifests itself through the distribution of functions between visible interface agents and invisible algorithmic mechanisms that govern visibility and attention. The study concludes that platform sociality is formed through the interaction between algorithmic mechanisms and user practices, which often redefine the original architecture of platforms. The article may be of interest to researchers in digital media studies, social philosophy, sociology of communication, and platform studies.
The article examines the influence of material practices of producing, transmitting, and combining visual forms (from classical maps and diagrams to digital twins) on the production and circulation of knowledge about the city. The authors proceed from the assumption that visualization techniques are not neutral intermediaries but actively shape urban reality, acting as instruments for managing space and the actions of citizens, managers, and politicians. The work aims to explain how the representation of urban data is constrained by the materiality of media and how the evolution of visual means transforms the ways of constructing the urban imaginary. The central result is a historical perspective that reveals interactions with the city in connection with representations mediated by geographical data. It is shown that maps, diagrams, and digital twins acquire autonomy from their creators, legitimizing themselves through graphic scales, data compression, and the totality of the gaze, which compels social actors to materialize the world encoded within them. Unlike classical maps, the digital twin radicalizes this optic, configuring the user as a “virtual camera” capable of penetrating surfaces and eliminating horizons. Rethinking geographical information in terms of relationality and situatedness opens up prospects for expanding interpretive empirical practice. The article is intended for sociologists, urbanists, visual culture researchers, as well as practitioners in the fields of urban planning and urban development management.
This article analyzes the transformation of subjectivity in ideological communication within the context of digital society. Based on the understanding of ideology as a system of universalizable meanings that claim normative interpretation of political reality, the authors examine the transition from an institutionally fixed and asymmetrical communication model to distributed forms of meaning production. It is shown that digitalization disrupts the link between the subject's intention and the outcome of ideological discourse, necessitating a theoretical shift from the category of subjectivity to the category of agency. Methodologically, the research relies on actor-network theory, which allows for the interpretation of ideological communication as an effect of the interaction of multiple actors (internet users). It is demonstrated that in the digital environment, ideological meanings are formed through collective interpretation, and their final significance is determined not by the author, but by the configuration of network interactions. The conclusion is drawn that contemporary ideological communication loses its centralized character and takes the form of a polycentric, dynamic, and weakly controlled process, in which the network acts as a key actor in the production of ideological effects.
This paper addresses the issue of a new psychotic reality (A.P. Sidenkova) emerging in the period following the post-humanist turn – a new normality, the post-truth era, the post-COVID era, and the rise of post- and non-human actors in the form of AI-agents (LLMs, GPTs, chatbots). Psychotic reality, as a reality in which people become utterly alienated from themselves, projecting their own non-human (void) nature, associated with death, non-being, Nothingness, toward AI‑agents, manifests itself in a crisis of meaning, in a drive toward madness, or delusion in psychiatric terms. The aim of this article is to critically examine AI as a new form of non-human sociality, a subject, and a moral agent within the framework of the posthuman turn. The objectives of the article are as follows: a) to analyze contemporary generations of AI as subjects, moral agents, and typical representatives of posthuman forms; b) calling the technological singularity into question; c) examining the post-human turn as the root cause of the emergence of LLMs. A philosophical-anthropological method is employed to analyze LLM systems from the perspective of “digital undead.” Critical and deconstructive approaches are applied to problematize posthuman sociality. The novelty of this work lies in the idea that AI does exist but it does not think– that is, it exhibits anti-Cartesian behavior, being a simulacrum. The work also examines a diagnosis associated with the phenomenon of a new psychotic reality – AI-psychosis – which arises as a result of a person’s own AI jailbreak. The conclusion is drawn, that AI cannot be either subject or agent, yet it can directly shape a new psychotic reality. Being born of the void within humanity, AI serves as a perfect mirror capable of reflecting our madness and casting it back upon us. This article will be of interest to researchers of artificial intelligence systems, humanism, posthumanism, the technological singularity, and the posthuman turn, as well as to the specialists in philosophy of medicine, particularly psychiatry.
